Quality on Commercial DVD vs Encore made DVD

[Carlos Angeli]

I’m going to try Eric’s advice first and see what happens. Michael, I have a Video card that I think it has Cuda cores (GeForce GTX 550 TI), but I have never thought it could improve my video workflow. I’ll look into that later.

[Carlos Angeli]

Eric, I just followed the explanation from one of the links you provided (https://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009/07/hd-to-sd-dvd-best-methods/), and I have to say I’m most impressed with the quality of the downscaled video from Virtualdub.

That said, there’s something that I’m not sure about. I thought after reading the article, that the steps were:
1-Export from Premiere using MPEG2 I-frame.
2-Create AVS script.
3-Run Virtualdub to downscale video.
4-Run Encore to create DVD or use HC encoder.

It’s actually the last step the one that confuses me a little bit. At first, I thought HC was an alternative to using Encore, but then I realized that it transforms the AVI file into m2v.

So, I still need to use Encore to create the DVD ISO?

[Carlos Angeli]

Just wanted to post an update after some testing. I followed two procedures: The one in Precomposed blog, and Jeff Bellune’s excellent tutorial on downscalling.

So far, exporting MPEG2 I-frame from Premiere, indexing with DGMPEGdec and finally saving an AVI file from Virtualdub with Avisynth gave the best results for downscalling.

From there, I had two choices: Use Encore to transcode the AVI and create the DVD ISO, or use HC Encoder to do the transcoding. This last option, gave me a transcoded m2v file that looks really good.

The only complain so far, is that I’m using permanent subtitles, and when going from AVI to m2V (already downscaled) the conversion seems to render a little bit of noise which is noticeable specially around the subs.

[Christopher Pitts]

Unless I missed it I don’t think anybody mentioned cinema craft software which is what a lot of Hollywood uses. I found much better results exporting highest possible from premiere then using cinema craft to encode for encore. Even though the files were linked from Premier into Encore, I was able to select the cinema craft encoded files for sources and tell encore not to encode. The results were obviously much crisper text, color, and imagery.